CBR14 Bingo square: Scandal! Vivian Morris is involved in a scandal that scandalises her suburban upper middle-class family; the theatre is generally considered to be a disreputable environment by the polite society that relishes it.
Whether or not you like City of Girls will depend on whether or not you like Vivian Morris, narrator and heroine, who is a white rich suburban girl (daddy owns a mine, mother is obsessed with horses) kicked out of Vassar in 1940 and sent to live with her theatrical Aunt Peg in New York City. Vivian is pretty and knows it, loves fashion and is an excellent designer and seamstress (and knows it); her natural confidence and sense of entitlement is balanced out by being a virgin who is keen to exchange innocence for experience; she is bemused and bedazzled by her new environment of show tunes and showgirls, dancing and drinking, sex and style. And she is 19, and therefore inevitably ends up in a hell of her own making (relatively speaking) when left to her own devices, easily persuaded into a spate of rash decisions.
How Vivian rebounds from her self-inflicted crisis, and finds a place of her own, and learns to be as careful with other people’s feelings as she is careless with her own, and gains the voice of a frivolous but reflective old lady writing about her life to a mysterious young ‘Angela’ is an engaging summer read. It has overtones of La La Land (the musical and theatrical milieu, the vibrant romanticised cityscape) and Judith Krantz (sex, glamour, fashion, feisty heroines, historical sweep), and occasional moments of poignancy:
If I’d known then what what I know now–namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific–I would have had sex with even more of them.
If it sounds like I’m being facetious, I’m not. (109-110)
The period detail is dreamy and escapist (“I sat in the diner car for the whole ride, sipping malted milk, eating pears in syrup, smoking cigarettes, and paging through magazines”) and the city is a delicious whirlwind of possibility loaded with nostalgia, past and future at once:
But this is a city that gets born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time. So that city, that place–newly created for my eyes only–will never exist again. It is preserved forever in my memory like an orchid trapped in a paperweight. That city will always be my perfect New York. (22)
There is some sardonic commentary on the manners and mores expected of a good suburban middle class girl in the mid-century (recalling Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1966) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)). The supporting cast of characters is fun–I’d read a follow up about Aunt Peg, her time in the trenches in World War I and her partner Olive, about which we only get tantalising hints from time to time. Vivian’s first love is a realistically passionate but tense affair, and a relationship she later develops with another man is unusual, and unusually tender.
It’s the sort of book that gets described as “rollicking” and a “romp”–Elizabeth Gilbert also wrote Eat, Pray, Love (2006), a memoir of a privileged white woman’s travels in search of herself that lapsed into sententiousness and self-pity at times. This is, perhaps by design, a far breezier and easy to digest beach read. I’ve found more to say about it than I initially thought I would.